The Manhattan Hunt Club

by John Saul

  He finished architecture school and moved back to Bridgehampton, since neither he nor Heather wanted to raise Randy in the city.

  In the days following Jeff’s escape from the tunnels, there had been remarkably little publicity about the unusual number of prominent people who had died in such a short period of time. Not a word of the real story appeared in the press, and Jeff and Heather knew exactly why: The Hundred had closed ranks, and the members’ version had replaced the truth.

  It seemed Perry Randall had been the victim of a mugger.

  Carey Atkinson had committed suicide in the face of a failing marriage, mounting debts, and a looming scandal in the Police Department.

  Monsignor Terrence McGuire had retreated to an isolated monastery in Tuscany.

  Judge Otto Vandenberg had died of a stroke and Arch Cranston had succumbed to a heart attack a day later.

  Eve Harris, however, had apparently simply vanished, and though for months afterward the media had indulged in endless—and ever more sensational—speculation as to what might have happened to her, even that story had eventually faded away.

  The One Hundred, as anonymous as ever, silently filled the vacancies within their ranks.

  The life of the city went on.

  When the train reached 110th Street Jeff stood up and led his son to the platform. As they headed for the stairs to the surface, he glanced at the spot where Cindy Allen had been attacked.

  The spot where the near destruction of his life had begun.

  Nothing about that far corner of the station hinted at what had happened there almost six years earlier. Perhaps it was that very anonymity that gave him pause. He was still gazing at the blank white tile of the far wall when his son tugged at his arm.

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?” the little boy piped.

  His son’s voice pulled Jeff back from the past and he smiled down at Randy. “Nothing,” he assured him, swinging the boy up into his arms and starting quickly up the stairs. “Nothing at all.”

  The anxiety of being in the subway evaporating in the daylight, Jeff lowered his son to the sidewalk, but didn’t let go of his hand as they waited for a break in traffic.

  “You said you lived right by the subway,” Randy said, looking around at the restaurants and shops that lined the street.

  “Up there,” Jeff replied, pointing to the back of the building where he could see the familiar window of his old apartment. “See? The brick building. I lived on the third floor.”

  Randy gazed solemnly up at the grimy structure. “I like our house better,” he pronounced.

  “So do I,” Jeff agreed as the light changed and the sea of traffic finally parted, allowing them to cross. “I like it a lot better.”

  A couple of minutes later they came to the landing on the third floor, and Randy, recognizing the woman who stood in the apartment’s open door, pulled loose from his father and ran toward her.

  “Jinx!” he cried out, wrapping his arms around Jinx’s neck as she lifted him up and planted a kiss on his forehead.

  “Look at you! Almost grown up. Too big for a lollipop, right?”

  “No!” Randy squealed. Wriggling back to the floor, he looked at his father. “Can I have one?” he pleaded.

  “Just don’t tell your mom,” Jeff said, winking at the little boy. As Randy peeled the wrapping off the lollipop Jinx had produced from the pocket of her sweatshirt, Jeff glanced around the apartment. Even with his drafting table gone, it had the unmistakable look of students’ quarters. The posters on the walls had changed, and the brick-and-board shelves he’d built were now filled with Jinx’s textbooks instead of his own, but the paint was still peeling, the curtains hadn’t been changed, and the carpet was even more worn than he remembered.

  “Hey, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” Jinx said, grinning as she read his thoughts. “In two more years, I graduate, and then I’m out of here.” Her grin faded. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. If you hadn’t let me move in here—”

  “You’d have found somewhere else to live,” Jeff cut in, not letting her finish. “You could have stayed with Tillie.”

  Jinx shook her head. “I love Tillie, but if I’d stayed down there much longer . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. They both remembered the rooms under the streets where Tillie still looked after her family. Most of the faces had changed. Robby had moved to the surface two years ago when the parents of one of his schoolmates found out where he was living and invited him to share their son’s bedroom. It wasn’t until they’d invited Tillie and Jinx for dinner and discussed the whole situation that Robby had finally agreed to try the surface again, and that had only been with the understanding that he could go back to Tillie any time he wanted to. He still went to visit Tillie at least once a week, and she emerged from her “co-op” every few months to have dinner with Robby’s new family. But at the end of the evening, she always looked forward to getting back to the tunnels. “Too complicated up here,” she insisted. “Too much to think about, too much to worry about.”

  “So?” Jeff asked Randy as the boy began licking his lollipop. “Sure you don’t want to move in here?”

  Randy shook his head. “It’s ugly,” he pronounced.

  “Hey! Is that any way to talk about Jinx’s house?”

  “The boy’s got good taste,” Jinx said. “Let’s go get lunch. I have two classes this afternoon, and then I’ve got to get to work.”

  “Still working both jobs?”

  Jinx shrugged. “The way I figure it, I didn’t work any jobs for so long that now I’m playing catch-up. By the time I graduate, I figure I’ll be even, and then I can cut back to one job. And that one is going to pay more than waitressing.”

  Leaving the apartment, they went to the diner that had always been Jeff’s favorite and found a table by the window so they could watch the activity on Broadway. The mix of people hadn’t changed much since Jeff had lived in the neighborhood: mostly students with a lot of university faculty and staff mixed in. But there were others as well—tourists and shoppers and people just prowling the city.

  And always the homeless.

  An old woman—nearly indistinguishable from Tillie to a casual observer—pushed an overflowing shopping cart, and down the street three shabbily dressed men sat on the sidewalk, their backs resting against a wall, panhandling for change.

  For a long moment both Jinx and Jeff gazed at them in silence, and it was finally Jeff who uttered the thought that was in both their heads.

  “Do you suppose it’s still going on?”

  Seconds ticked by as Jinx said nothing, but at last she shook her head. “It was Ms. Harris,” she said. “She was the one who passed out the money, and without the money, it never would have worked.”

  “Ever wonder what happened to her?”

  Jinx’s expression darkened. “I’m just glad she’s gone.”

  Half an hour later Jeff and Randy were back in the subway station, waiting for a train to take them back downtown. “Who’s Ms. Harris?” Randy asked, looking up at his father.

  Jeff hesitated, then said, “Just someone we used to know, a long time ago.”

  “Was she a friend of Auntie Jinx’s?”

  A southbound train roared into the station. Jeff clutched tight to Randy’s hand as the crowd of departing passengers swirled past them, then helped him step onto the train. “No,” he said as the doors closed. “Ms. Harris wasn’t a friend of Auntie Jinx’s. She wasn’t a friend of anyone’s.”

  The train started to move and Jeff reached up with his free hand to grab the railing above his head. For a fleeting second, he saw someone peering at him through the window from the platform.

  A woman, her face nearly lost in the folds of a ragged shawl.

  He glimpsed her face for only a few fleeting seconds, and yet it terrified him. It was a face that looked as if it had been attacked. The skin was deeply scarred, the features distorted and twisted. It reminded him of the tunnels and
the time he’d spent in them, seeing people who had been attacked by other people, or rats, or insects, or alcohol and drugs, or simply by life itself.

  It was a face that was universal in the tunnels.

  It was the eyes that he recognized.

  They were the same eyes that had looked at him during the one moment when he’d thought a stranger might choose to help him.

  And that person had turned away.

  Now, as the train began to move, it was Jeff who turned away from Eve Harris. When his son asked him a moment later if he knew who the lady was, he just shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “She wasn’t anybody. I don’t think anybody was there at all.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE PEOPLE LIVING UNDER MANHATTAN

  A full count of the people living beneath the streets of Manhattan is difficult to achieve for two simple reasons: The population is transient and most census officials do not wish to go into the tunnels. Estimates of their numbers vary wildly, from a few hundred, to a few thousand, to tens of thousands. Since Grand Central Station was restored and most of its public seating removed, the homeless have largely disappeared from that very public venue, though they can still be found making efforts to keep themselves clean in the rest rooms on the lower levels. Though many of the “nests” above the tracks have been cleaned out, this does not mean the people who inhabited those nests are no longer in the city; rather, they have simply burrowed deeper into the tunnels, beyond the reach of official New York.

  To date, there is no complete and integrated map of the tunnel system beneath the city. Partial maps exist: the subway system, the water system, the various utility systems. But in addition to the tunnels and passageways and storm drains that are still in use, there are miles of abandoned tunnels that have been long forgotten. Forgotten, at any rate, by everyone except those who live in them.

  Contrary to popular belief, not all the people who live beneath the streets are derelicts and drunks. Many of them are productive members of society, holding jobs and attending school, giving false surface addresses to whatever bureaucracies they come in contact with. Some families have chosen to live under the streets rather than having their children separated from them by government agencies. Many of these people do not consider themselves homeless, but only “houseless.” They organize themselves into tribes and family groups and establish territorial claims beneath the city. It is said that the deeper people live beneath the city, the less frequently they visit the surface and the less likely it is that they will ever live on the surface again.

  Many of our subterranean citizens suffer from mental illness and chemical dependencies that often make them incapable of taking advantage of the services that are provided for them. They drift through our lives, muttering softly to themselves or ranting at invisible enemies, until finally they disappear back underground.

  Underground and out of our consciousness.

  All of the characters and events in this book, on the surface and in the tunnels, are fictional. At least, I hope they are . . .

  —J.S.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many, many people helped me in the preparation of this book, especially with regard to the New York City criminal justice system. My dear friend Elkan Abramowitz and his partner, Bill McGuire, connected me with all the right people and guided me through the various judicial departments of New York City, and Marvin Mitzner, Esq., put me in touch with the mayor’s office. People from the district attorney’s office, the police department, and the Department of Correction were all very cooperative in showing me their facilities, familiarizing me with their procedures, and answering my innumerable questions. From the district attorney’s office, I particularly want to thank Constance Cucchiara, who spent a morning guiding me through the courtrooms at 100 Centre Street and solved the mystery of the missing twelfth floor. From the Midtown South Precinct, I am especially indebted to Adam D’Amico, who gave me a guided tour of the precinct house and instructed me in the procedures involved in booking a person into the judicial system. I owe a special thanks to Deborah Hamlor and Jo-Ona Danoise of the City of New York Department of Correction, who spent an entire day with me as I toured Rikers Island and the Manhattan Detention Complex. They not only provided me with mountains of information but were endlessly patient. Many thanks to both of you! Others who were generous with their time and information at Rikers Island were Bureau Captain Sheila Vaughan, Head of Special Transportation Brian Riordan, and many other correction officers. Thank you for an enlightening experience and for your time and energy. John Scudiero, warden of the Manhattan Detention Complex, also took several hours to educate me about his facility and its relationship to the New York City courts and provided me with a tour from a prisoner’s perspective. I also wish to thank the judges and bailiffs who seemed utterly unsurprised to see me appearing through the doors usually reserved for prisoners. Thanks, too, to Mayor Giuliani’s office for connecting me with various precincts in Manhattan, and to the transit police, who didn’t apprehend me as I endlessly poked around subway stations and Grand Central station, taking pictures, peering down tunnels, and generally behaving in what must have seemed a very suspicious manner.

  By John Saul:

  SUFFER THE CHILDREN***

  PUNISH THE SINNERS***

  CRY FOR THE STRANGERS***

  COMES THE BLIND FURY***

  WHEN THE WIND BLOWS***

  THE GOD PROJECT**

  NATHANIEL**

  BRAINCHILD**

  HELLFIRE**

  THE UNWANTED**

  THE UNLOVED**

  CREATURE**

  SECOND CHILD**

  SLEEPWALK**

  DARKNESS**

  SHADOWS**

  GUARDIAN*

  THE HOMING*

  BLACK LIGHTNING*

  THE BLACKSTONE CHRONICLES:

  Part 1: AN EYE FOR AN EYE: THE DOLL*

  Part 2: TWIST OF FATE: THE LOCKET*

  Part 3: ASHES TO ASHES: THE DRAGON’S FLAME*

  Part 4: IN THE SHADOW OF EVIL:

  THE HANDKERCHIEF*

  Part 5: DAY OF RECKONING: THE STEREOSCOPE*

  Part 6: ASYLUM*

  THE PRESENCE*

  THE RIGHT HAND OF EVIL*

  NIGHTSHADE*

  THE MANHATTAN HUNT CLUB*

  *Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  **Published by Bantam Books

  ***Published by Dell Books

  PRAISE FOR JOHN SAUL

  The Manhattan Hunt Club

  “Nonstop action keeps the book

  moving at a brisk pace.”

  —Library Journal

  “Thrilling . . . Packed with plot twists.”

  —Booklist

  Nightshade

  “[Saul] haunts his shadowy realm ingeniously and

  persistently. . . . Nightshade may be his masterpiece.”

  —Providence Journal

  “Gripping . . . Saul, and his unerring instincts to instill fear, returns to tap into our deepest, most closely guarded shadows and secrets.”

  —Palo Alto Daily News

  The Right Hand of Evil

  “[A] tale of evil that is both extreme and entertaining.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “[A] whopper of a nightmare tale . . . Dazzling . . . Dizzying twists.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  The Presence

  “A suspenseful thriller . . . Provocative . . .

  Nicely done, indeed.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Enough smoothly crafted suspense to keep readers turning pages long after dark.”

  —The Seattle Times

  Black Lightning

  “Electrifyingly scary.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “One of Saul’s best.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  The Homing

  “If you are a Stephen King/Dean Koontz fan,

  The Homing is a book you will only open once
.

  You will not put it down until its last page has

  been absorbed. John Saul takes the psychological

  suspense novel to a new height.”

  —The Dayton Voice

  “Eerie . . . Chills aplenty.”

  —The West Coast Review of Books

  Guardian

  “Chills and thrills . . . A great hair-raiser.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Tension and terror . . . A suspense-filled

  and logical tale.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  Please read on for an exciting preview of John Saul’s latest book

  MIDNIGHT VOICES

  Coming in hardcover in June 2002.

  Published by Ballantine Books.

  PROLOGUE

  There’s nothing going on. Nobody’s watching me. Nobody’s following me.

  The words had become a mantra, one he repeated silently over and over again, as if by simple repetition he could make the phrases true.

  The thing was, he wasn’t absolutely certain they weren’t true. If something really was going on, he had no idea what it might be, or why. Sure, he was a lawyer, and everybody supposedly hated lawyers, but that was really mostly a joke. Besides, all he’d ever practiced was real estate law, and even that had been limited to little more than signing off on contracts of sale, and putting together some boilerplate for leases. As far as he knew, no one involved in any of the deals he’d put his initials on had even been unhappy, let alone developed a grudge against him.

  Nor had he caught anyone watching him. Or at least he hadn’t caught anyone watching him any more than anybody watched anybody else. Like right now, while he was running in Central Park. He watched the other runners, and they watched him. Well, maybe it wasn’t really watching—more like keeping an eye out to make sure he didn’t run into anybody else, or get run over by a biker or a skater, or some other jerk who was on the wrong path. No, it was more like just a feeling he got sometimes. Not all the time.

  Just some of the time.

  On the sidewalk sometimes.

  Mostly in the park.